Exxar

That would leave you able to go Musculature for max damage and Rebirth for max survivability.

My /dark is using a Theft of Essence to solve end issues, leaving me free to pick any epic pool I want. And if I'd want to run CoF constantly, I'd get Cardiac or Ageless.

None, because I have enough set bonuses for it to be at 80%+ to hit, and the Kismet unique can help even before lvl 50. But I don't run it most of the time anyway. It's the most skippable power in the set.

So don't skip Dark Regeneration.

Just like all self-rez powers. But this one mezzes everything around you when you use it.

No argument there on the cossie issue, but anti fury? How?

With a base recharge time of 30 seconds it's the fastest recharging self-heal in the game. You can get it to 15 seconds with no investment in sets whatsoever, and once you have a fully kitted-out toon you can get it to 10s no problem. And as for being in the melee range of baddies to work... so do all of your attack powers too. Doh.

I'd like to chime in for a bit, as reading this it seems to me that you could be entering this game with strong expectations set in some other MMOs and that those expectations are greatly affecting your experience. I apologize if that's not the case, but if it is, here's some info on group play and a couple other things in CoH that came to my mind:


Unlike some other MMOs, group play in CoH is intended to take place in all of the content, not only in the stuff you see in the LFG interface. As a matter of fact, there are very few trials available through the LFG interface in comparison with the rest of such content that is not accessed via LFG (which itself is a very recent addition to the game). As far as I know, in some of the more popular MMOs, people don't bother grouping below the level cap and/or outside "dungeons", "trials", "raids" etc. Things are different in CoH - the game is intended for grouping from level 1, and in absolutely all of its content. Practically everything you do will be in instanced missions - there are very few mission objectives outside instances, and all of them are legacy content from back when the game was starting. The mobs inside the missions scale with the number of players present in the team, and/or depending on your difficulty settings. So basically, the point of the game, unless you're a hardcore "raider" or something analogous to that, is to play through regular content with a couple (up to 7) other people who are either your buddies, or who you randomly meet and invite to your group (PUGs). "Raiding" is actually not any different, except that instead of playing regular missions you play content analogous to raids in other games, such as Task/Strike Forces and Incarnate Trials, which give much better rewards than regular missions.

Of course, the beauty of the game is that if you don't like to group, you can play 95% of the game solo - everything except Task/Strike Forces and Incarnate Trials.



Regarding your observations that specific "class" roles are apparently irrelevant - team composition does makes a difference in playstyle, but the point of "class" makeups in CoH is that they're very flexible. You don't need a tank and a healer, even though both would be very handy - you can play through any of the content no matter what archetypes are present because each archetype brings something different to the table, and no archetype is useless or significantly weaker in the absence of another. And for your experience of "anarchic free-for-alls" I must say that you were unlucky with finding teams, as it's obvious from your description that the players you've teamed with didn't really know how to play the game and were poorly coordinated, whether because of ignorance or because they were new. On the other hand, if you were playing below level 20 or so, the poor performance could have been a case of most archetypes really coming into their own after lvl 20 (for example, Tankers are nothing but bags of HP before they get their mez protection power and taunt aura, and in some cases the latter can be first available as late as lvl 18).


So there, I hope this helps you bridge the gap between your experience in other MMOs and CoH

Welcome to the game!

You can solo them, just like everything else. There's an EB at the end, but the rest is normal fare, and you won't be having any problems with the EB as a melee toon (you don't even need insps).

As for turning the difficulty down... it depends. The SSA are a very convenient way to farm alignment merits with multiple toons, so if that's what you're after, turn it down to +0/x1. But in order to be able to get an alignment merit, you must be a hero or villain that has confirmed his alignment by doing at least one hero/villain morality mission after becoming a hero/villain. So if you're for example starting out as a villain and want to remain one, you just need to do one vill morality mish (that will confirm your villain alignment), but if you're starting as a villain and want to become a hero, you need to do two hero morality mishes (one to become a hero, and the other to confirm your alignment).

But know that in order to farm alignment merits on SSAs, you need multiple toons for that because you're limited to one alignment merit per toon per week. You also get a freebie alignment merit the very first time you do each SSA with a specific toon, but after that, the shared weekly cooldown kicks in. Also, the first SSA is much quicker than the second one, on both sides, so that's the one you wanna run.

And btw, if you haven't had any experience with alignment merits yet, know that two of them will get you any non-purple, non-PVP recipe in the game. So you can use them to get stuff that sells for the most inf, and make a fortune on the market. And of course use that stuff yourself.





If you're not into farming SSAs for alignment merits, run them at whatever difficulty you normally run content.

No, Electric Fences + Ball Lightning do more damage than Fireball.

A license to receive rewards in AE and create arcs. The Tier 2 access you mention simply gives you the ability to play arcs but without any rewards whatsoever, including exp and inf (not only tickets), and you can't publish any arcs (didn't try editing local ones).

Interesting, the blueside contact for this is named after a king from Middle-earth.